Inter American Development Bank: scale, by gimleteye

Being a close reader of The Miami Herald, it is clear that the Sunday edition is destined, primarily, for visitors associated with the annual meeting of the Inter American Development Bank.

Perhaps some of our visitors would like an interpretation and commentary that you won't find on the pages of the city's only daily newspaper... read more.

The main editorial in the Issues section of the paper concerns water resources; specifically, the wasting of vast quantities of water through ocean outfalls. Water resource management in Latin America is a very significant problem, and I suppose that the timing of the Herald editorial is meant, in some way, as kind of parallel piece to the front page story in the A section about the optimism of the Brickell Avenue city center, an example of how intensive growth (in that case, of condominiums serving the downtown banking and legal and foreign commerce) can build communities.

But the fact is that the massive urban scale of South Florida, which the Herald championed or whose costs it turned a blind eye to, has been ruinous to water resources. And ocean outfalls are only part of the problem. Miami Dade county has been subsidizing the cost of development for decades at great expense to citizens: overwhelming traffic congestion, overcrowded classrooms, a neglected urban population and communities, and a wastewater stream that doesn't just go into the ocean after treatment (inadequate) but is buried in vast quantities underground through injection wells, some of which are leaking upwards.

The Inter-American Development Bank is one of those creations of the first world that has invested, through member nations, in large infrastructure projects that serve, primarily, large multinational corporations and extractive industries.

Miami and its functioning electricity, highway system, and wealth appears as a shining example to much of Latin and South America. A vast ocean of flight capital has parked itself here, as a hedge against instability at home. Everything works. But really, it doesn't.

As the post below by G.O.D. notes, the scale of Miami-Dade government defeats the best efforts of reasonable governance. The status quo is as entrenched in Miami as in many Latin American nations.

But the case can be made that the failures of the US economy and leadership are in no small part because we have reached the end of the road, when it comes to basing development on gargantuan scale and the vanities of leverage. Smaller is better.

The problem facing Miami and the nation is how to reform economic models that flourish only on that gargantuan scale, like the electric utilities (FPL, for example) who continue to pitch growth based on incremental volume increases in production, capacity, and consumer base, when the obvious course of action is to decentralize and to conserve.

The Brickell Avenue model is no model to follow: Miami is literally one hurricane away from the Brickell nightmare. And even the economic model Miami Beach and the attraction of its Art Deco district needs scrutiny for what happens when mass market, or down market, commerce overwhelms the features that first made the place attractive and a magnet for busienss.

In fact, in terms of planning for the human scale, Florida is a disaster. The Miami Herald has covered, scarcely at all, the titantic struggle by activists and ordinary people to place on a state wide ballot an amendment to the Florida constitution called Florida Hometown Democracy. The provision of FHD would require citizen involvement in comprehensive land use planning. The initiative--throttled and stymied from being placed on the state-wide ballot in a presidential election year--represents a real rebellion against an unsustainable status quo.

As such, it would have tapped into wide public dissatisfaction with economic interests whose commitment to gargantuan scale dominates local and state legislatures.

The Florida Chamber of Commerce, Associated Industries, and the machinery of suburban sprawl pledged to raise whatever money is required to defeat Florida Hometown Democracy in the face of every indication that the US economy--not just Florida's--is buckling under the cumulative weight of economic models of growth that cannot protect people.

That is something for the attendees of the Inter American Development Bank to think about, and to help in reading between the lines of The Miami Herald.